Thermals

D did this one. I love it.

Fiddler on the Roof, the movie, came out, I was nine. And utterly enthralled. I wore my hair in a kerchief like the girls in the film. I latched on to anything with a whiff of Jewishness. Not hard at the time, there were TV specials on the Holocaust, The Chosen, and I latched onto this catastrophic story with all my heart. I considered converting, well, what else would a dissatisfied Catholic girl do? It was romantic and tragic, appealing to every bit of drama in my soul.

It took me many years and a lot of reading to come to the realization that Judaism has a dark side, especially for the women. That insularity isn't healthy, and bigotry flows in all directions. That there are reasons for stereotypes, even if they never justify persecution. But I was young, and categories were a reasonable way to try to understand the world, and for me, the Jews were noble and suffering heroes - which also fits nicely with the Catholic worship of martyrs.

I struggled with black (African-American) modes of expression and values when I first lived around them in college, and did not completely resolve my prejudices. Not then. I never indulged in dislike for anyone based on their ethnicity, but I did find some cultures difficult to appreciate. Usually group survival traits that clashed. An ethic to work hard, do it for oneself and educate oneself, tends not to work if you are an enslaved people in a hot climate - where playing dumb, not getting too attached and taking it slow will make the unbearable barely survivable. That ethic will always outlive the necessity, as it becomes taught and normalized. Individuals will always vary from this norm, and deserve to be seen as such. But we are all of us both ourselves, and a face of our tribe. Even when we completely reject it, we mirror where we came from.

I still find Muslim values and mores hard to accept, especially for the women veiled and denied autonomy. There is safety, of a sort, and the ease of a lack of responsibility in being a woman under authority of a spouse. Not the kind of life I would ever chose, but as a person with no dogma or parents, no structure to tell me what to do, no one to blame, I sometimes feel the weight of my own life on my soul.

I take people much more as they are, these days. I recognize when they come from a distinct culture, a visibly different genetic set or original language, but it matters so much less. It's merely a description, one element among many, that makes them neither more admirable nor awful than any other single aspect. We are all doing the best we can with what we have, with what we've been given. Including an innate curiosity or rebelliousness, or need for peace and comfort, for freedom, or for close family ties. And we all sort these preferences differently.

We all share the same soul, as we are responsible for our particular gleam of it in our own lifetime.

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